


These wounds

by GoFigure



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Cutting, Gen, I wish there were therapists for the magical world, Sectumsempra, muggles can call 1800273TALK, not a pleasant fic, trigger warning: self-harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-31 09:20:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12678978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoFigure/pseuds/GoFigure
Summary: Short fic about how 16 year old Severus tries to cope but not very successfully.





	These wounds

**Author's Note:**

> Title from an Evanescence song, My Immortal. This fic was originally named that, but I changed it due to another famous (infamous?) work with that title. I feel like the lyrics fit well here.  
> Thanks to Snarry5evr for her input on this and encouraging me to post. This would have never happened without her.

Sixth year was one of the worst years of his life. At least, it was a bad start to the rest of his life. After Lily decided to end their friendship, it became an end to a beautiful chapter. He tried to make up with her both before the end of fifth year and during the summer, but his closest, only true friendship had evaporated like smoke. It left him feeling...empty. From the first moment he started watching her, her sunshine and goodness filled him, and he drank it up like a man thirsting in a desert. Even the dark nights with his shit-faced father and his cowering mother could not take away his dancing ray of sunshine. 

It started slowly with him trying to muster the courage to talk to her, but once he revealed himself, she accepted him as her friend immediately. It warmed him, gave him hope, peace, and an insatiable longing. He loved her to the depths of his soul. They started off talking about little things: the way a flower’s petals could be made to change design, a child’s knowledge of governmental relations with the muggle world, how one could make dirt clods into snowmen. This morphed over time towards more philosophical discussions about whether magic could make one kinder or better. Lily thought the world would be full of bitterness, hate, and love--magical ability or not. Severus was less certain and wondered if the world could be forced to be more accepting. Regardless of the topic, they sharpened each other’s minds and shared the warmth of companionship. Anytime he could escape his miserable home life, he would wait for her by their tree, its leaves fluttering like butterflies in anticipation of their conversations. 

When he arrived at school, he felt his first true pang of separation from her. It was the first time that this cloud came between them. He struggled to find the light when they were apart; he found, if not warmth, at least a way to engage his blistering curiosity and channeled his frustrations into darker conversations and experiments. He found a familiar darkness amongst some of his fellow Slytherins. A few in particular fanned his not-quite-dormant anger and bitterness into what they all thought was righteous indignation, their cause leading to a demand for change in the world. A way to take back power. Force it back. 

It was this volatile captivation and hunger which waged itself inside of him. Lily felt it growing, and Severus started to notice how it was eclipsing her sunshine. The lovely conversations about life, creation, and peace turned into darker ones about raging against the powers and fighting against the laws in place. Severus had come into his own and finally pushed aside his childhood cowering for something grand and glorious. So he thought. 

Lily felt like her friend was dying. She tried to spend more and more time with him, remind him of beautiful things, make silly jokes and confront his thinking, defend him both in and out his presence, but the shadows behind his eyes became increasingly apparent, obvious as to where his thoughts had been with those with whom he had surrounded himself. It was tenuous, and she began missing her friend even when they were together.

Then the shit hit the fan. Snape entertained the thought of killing James after his humiliating prank. When Lily mentioned it, he thought he would die. He never hated someone as much. Even his pathetic excuse for a father never embarrassed him in front of Lily. Course he had never met her, but still. His fight with her would go down as his worst memory. Of his own accord, he stuck the dagger into the sun, pulled down, and broke the only light he had ever known, shattering it. And as the words came out, unexamined, calloused, and hardened, he felt it almost tangibly: the blinds coming down, curtains closing, world-shifting darkness. And there was no hope. He tried to make amends but had no experience with watching someone try to break their own black veil and was clueless about what to do. As it was, he put his grief secretly into a one-sided friendship and turned to the only other thing he knew. The Darkness. 

The summer before sixth year, he spent as little time at home as possible. Instead, he worked and researched, experimented and planned with his cohort on how to force the world to change. But still the pain and emotions raged and warred inside without any hope of putting them to rest. The more he felt, the more he poured into his work. Just before school started, he got his cheap, second-hand school books and quickly read through them, correcting the idiot that wrote each page. He had long since started experimenting with spells. With new theories to explore, an arsenal of time and anger, and a sharp mind, he was poised over a precipice.

He was praised by his associates and envied by his classmates, especially among seventh years: none were as brilliant or as knowledgeable as he on any subject. But every time he saw his beautiful former friend--his precious flower--saw her eyes alight with passion in their potions class, or glimpsed her among her friends throwing them smiles and uninhibited laughs that would have formerly been shared with him, he felt the darkness cling to him all over again. He felt its oily slime stick to him like an acid that burned. It was after one of these classes that Snape, practicing his experiments in an unused classroom, landed upon one of his more disturbing discoveries. 

Sectumsempra. The name was spliced together as a self-purge; and it, as seemed everything else about Severus’s actions, was developed out of torment. A blend of sectum: to sever or cut, having been cut off. And semper: always, ever, continuously, at all times. Always. The word constantly echoed in his mind, cutting it to ribbons. 

Others later thought it was developed specifically for James. But Severus alone knew the truth. He watched his arms after the first time, watching the blood pour from them, feeling the release of pain and torment, closing his mind against the onslaught of everything that was going on inside his head. The world narrowed down to this moment. He muttered the countercurse that drew the blood back in his veins and closed them up. Then tore the skin open again. And again. And again. Sometimes, he wouldn’t call the blood back. 

He started wrapping his arms in gauze, changed his style of dress to tight-clenching sleeves that would more closely compress the wounds. He never let anyone see the scars. But in the darkness, alone at night, he would run his fingers along them, feeling in more control and in less pain than he ever had before. At least, that relief which he could give himself. For enemies, indeed, he thought. Enemy thoughts, feelings, abandoned friendship, fucked up home life, the call to fight and not look back. All of it. Always.

Eventually that year, pale and sallow, he found he could rid himself of the pain and learned to close his mind rather than cutting out the thoughts. He put his emotions in a box buried so far into his mind that not even the Dark Lord himself knew existed. Severus was so removed from them that he thought he had ridded himself of them completely and divorced himself into a machination of logical chaos and ‘control.’ 

And so he labored and worked with all his cunning and abilities towards a jaded promise of a better life for him and the magical world. He continued down the path that would wage war against others, and against his soul, and plunge him so far into darkness that it would eventually break him apart.


End file.
